


Bleedwood

by Silex



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/F, Feelings Realization, Friendship, Minor canon divergence, POV Minor Character, Secret Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23470783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Pansy sat in the library, doing her Divination homework.As easy pass she’d been told, just make things up, except she wasn’t creative in that way. Coming up with stories about people, her enemies, the people she wished were her friends, things like that she was good at. Making up stories about her future from pieces of burned wood?It was stupid, horribly, miserably stupid.And then the strangest, most unexpected happened, or the start of it at least.
Relationships: Lavender Brown/Pansy Parkinson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12
Collections: Robot Rainbow 2020





	Bleedwood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> Written for the Writing Rainbow: Robot Rainbow exchange where fic titles need to contain color names generated by an AI. Some of them were strange, some hilarious, some, like the one that this fic was titled after, were ominous.

The war hadn’t been kind to either of them, to any of them really, but especially to the two of them.

Pansy had been willing to accept that. She’d never been the pretty girl or the popular girl, though coming from such an old and respected bloodline meant that she’d had some admirers, some followers, but not friends, in her House.

It was the price of being a Slytherin, or so she told herself, living up to expectations.

Except she’d managed a friend, one friend.

One random friend, a chance encounter as irrational lightning striking. Which was ironic given how the friendship had started.

She’d been sitting in the library, doing her Divination homework.

As easy pass she’d been told, just make things up, except she wasn’t creative in that way. Coming up with stories about people, her enemies, the people she wished were her friends, things like that she was good at. Making up stories about her future from pieces of burned wood?

It was stupid, horribly, miserably stupid.

Pansy had all the books, all the notes on symbols and signs and of course the dratted piece of wood itself, carefully charred during class, under the watchful eye of Professor Trelawney and she couldn’t see anything more than cracks, smudges and the woodgrain.

And then a voice behind her.

“Ooh, xylomancy!”

She’d turned around, ready to make a scathing comment in response to what she thought was an insult.

Instead she looked in stunned silence at the girl, a Gryffindor, who was looking at her with the most sincere smile she’d ever seen.

“I love pyromancy, it’s so relaxing.”

Pansy glared at her, not sure how to respond to something like that other than with absolute honesty, “It’s just staring at a block of wood.”

The Gryffindor girl sat down next to her, “But the things you see. Look! There!”

Pansy stared at the black line splitting the wood’s grain.

“This means that you’ll need to make a tough choice sooner than you’d like.”

Pansy nearly said something, like telling her to get lost wasn’t tough at all, and then shoving her away, but then she thought better of it. It sounded like this stupid, random Gryffindor wanted to do her work for her.

Pansy started taking notes.

A knothole leaking sap like blood, the Gryffindor girl’s words, not hers, meant tragedy and or maybe love, or maybe even, and the Gryffindor’s eyes lit up with the thought, tragic love! Wasn’t that interesting and mysterious?

Pansy thought about the friendship she was trying to cultivate with Draco, at the behest of her parents despite not liking the skinny, sallow, _boy_ , though the last part didn’t occur to her as an issue until she was older.

Tragic love indeed.

It was something she could spin into a few lines on the parchment for sure.

So she encouraged the girl to read the piece of wood like a book.

“There’s a dire foe, or no! A Monster!” The Gryffindor shuddered, “But what does it represent?”

She traced a series of charred smudges back to the knothole.

“This tragic relationship,” she nodded sagely at Pansy, “It’s not good for you. You’ll need to be wary of…”

A deep crevasse in the wood, jagged and blackened gave the answer.

“An older man,” because of where it intersected the rings of the tree, straight through to the heartwood.

“Me and an older man?” Pansy glared at her, not sure why the insult was quite as horrible as it was. Her father had suggested the idea to her, that it would be good to further strengthen their ties with other respectable families and not all of them had sons her age.

Actually, she’d hated it when her father brought it up too.

“Not necessarily that he’s your lover, but he’ll lead you astray in love. An older relative giving bad advice?”

Oh, that was a very good starting point for something Pansy realized she could say a lot about. That was like making things up about people, specifically her father, without naming him.

An essay on her father’s plans for her and why she didn’t like any of them, getting credit for saying terrible things about people she didn’t like. Now she could see why pyromancy was relaxing.

“What’s this?” Pansy urged, pointing at two long burn marks curving and then intersecting.

“A chance meeting, but probably not important.”

The Gryffindor, whose name she learned was Lavender Brown well before the conversation ended, couldn’t have been more wrong.

Lavender became her go to source for help with Divination homework after that, always in secret of course, but one Pansy eagerly sought out. Lavender knew exactly what to say to make Trelawney happy. The Professor going as far to read large portions of her predictions to the rest of the class, claiming that Pansy had a true gift.

And who was Pansy to argue that?

Somehow, she didn’t know how it happened, but she and Lavender became friends because they had so much in common.

More than a Slytherin and Gryffindor should have, but Lavender came from a good, pureblood family, so there was that.

Except there was more to it than that.

Lavender loved gossip and laughing about whatever stupid thing someone was doing, but she wasn’t underhanded about it. Lavender said what was on her mind, her barbed comments were to be taken at face value, which meant when Pansy showed Lavender the article Rita Skeeter wrote based on what she had told the reporter, Lavender’s response was honest.

The woman was a liar, getting everything wrong. Then they both had a good laugh about Skeeter’s hair and glasses because, really?

At the end, Lavender looked over the article one last time and corrected herself, the whole article wasn’t wrong.

There were two words in it that were true.

_Pretty and vivacious._

In reference to Pansy.

It was the first time someone had actually complimented her when there was nothing to gain.

She’d never been pretty before and she didn’t know what vivacious even meant, but when Lavender said it Pansy felt both.

Looking back she would have loved to say that she became a better person after that, but that wasn’t the way it worked.

You didn’t turn your back on the people in your house, even a Hufflepuff would know that, so even if they weren’t her friends she stuck with them.

Right to the end.

They were all impressed when she said what they all had to be thinking, that turning Harry Potter over was the smartest thing to do, if it might make the Voldemort turn back and leave them alone. She wasn’t a coward, saying that should have proven it when no one else was willing to and afterwards, in the safety of their dormitory, all the Slytherins agreed.

Or all of them who mattered did.

She didn’t need any skill in divination to know that tragedy would follow if they didn’t do what Voldemort wanted.

And it did.

She and the others left.

Maybe some of them felt guilty and came back.

Or felt brave and came back with their parents to attack the school.

She didn’t know because she hid, weathered it out in the safety of home with her family.

There were times she wondered if she should have gone back.

If things would have turned out differently.

In desperation she lit candles and watched the shapes in the fire, pouring over the bits of burned wood as though she might see in them what Lavender always had.

Lavender hadn’t been making it up, Pansy was sure of that, no one could lie so sincerely, not even a Slytherin, let alone a Gryffindor. She could see things, maybe not the future, but things that other people couldn’t.

She’d convinced Pansy to keep taking Divination, helped her though all of the advanced forms.

They’d read each other’s palms, diagramed it all out for extra credit, noticing all of the differences and similarities. Pansy’s line of the heart intersected strangely, enough so that Lavender felt a whole essay could be written on it, she’d said as much as she’d traced its length up and down Pansy’s hand. Lavender’s line of fate had an odd little skip in it that the two of them contemplated for hours.

What did it mean?

Was it good?

Bad?

Something that would only be revealed in time or would it forever remain a mystery?

In the immediate aftermath of everything Pansy had stared at logs in the fire, cured and fresh, watched as they bled sap and searched for a message in them.

In the shapes in smoke.

In drops of egg in water.

Until she got an egg with a bloody yolk.

Death, but not for her.

It took longer than it should have for the news to get to her.

The Brown family was in mourning.

Lavender was dead.

Pansy wasn’t invited to the funeral, though she visited the grave and wondered.

What had she and Lavender been?

Friends?

Had she really lost her only friend?

Because she and Draco never spoke after their last time seeing each other at Hogwarts.

None of the girls from school made any attempt to reach out to her.

It was part of growing up, her father reminded her, leaving people behind. What was important was that she met new people, useful people.

And Pansy tried, she really, if only to get her parents to leave her alone to think.

Because what she’d done at school had followed her.

She was the girl who tried to turn Harry Potter over to Voldemort, either a frightened child or a traitor depending on who was asked.

There was so much that she needed to think about, like how what divination and friendship actually meant only became clear in hindsight.

Then an owl came late one night. An ordinary post owl, not belonging to anyone, hers was just the last stop on its rounds.

The letter it carried was short, simple.

For her.

Lavender was alive.

The circumstances of her ‘death’ made the charade almost reasonable.

Because any pureblood family would rather have a dead daughter than the dark secret of a werewolf.

Pansy did the only reasonable thing.

She wrote back, asking if there was anything she could do to help.

Not because she actually believed that she could help, but it was important that she knew where they stood.

A traitor and a werewolf, they had to be careful.

Lavender’s request was simple, a visit easily arranged.

Pansy’s skill at making things up about people meant that it was easy to plant the idea in her father’s head that there was someone she was interested in.

Someone he wouldn’t approve of.

If only he knew the truth.

But it didn’t matter.

The meeting was carefully planned, as far from the full moon as possible, apparating to an arranged meeting spot, the grave where Lavender had been ‘buried’ or one close to it in Lavender’s case as she’d never seen her own grave.

Greyback had savaged her badly, the scars would never heal.

Pansy saw none of it.

Lavender had said that she was pretty and vivacious and meant it and when Pansy held her in her arms she hoped that Lavender was able to feel the same way.


End file.
